Child pornography represents a severe form of exploitation and victimization of children, leaving the victims with emotional and physical trauma. In this study, we aim to analyze local patterns of child pornography consumption in 20 metropolitan regions of France using fine-grained mobile traffic data of Tor network-related web services. We conservatively estimate that approx. 3.3 % of Tor mobile download traffic observed in France is linked to the consumption of child sexual abuse materials by correlating it with local-level temporal porn consumption patterns. This compares to 16.9 % of what we estimate to be the global share of child pornographic content on Tor. In line with existing literature on the link between sexual child abuse and the consumption of image-based content thereof, we observe a positive and statistically significant effect of our child pornography consumption estimates on the reported number of victims of sexual violence and vice versa across 1341 French communes, which validates our findings, after controlling for a set of spatial and non-spatial features including socio-demographic characteristics, voting behaviour, nearby points of interest and Google Trends queries. While this is a first, exploratory attempt to look at child pornography from a spatial epidemiological angle, we believe this research provides public health officials with valuable information to prioritize target areas for public awareness campaigns and hopefully inform future paths of research in that area.

翻译：儿童色情是一种严重的儿童剥削与受害形式，给受害者造成情感和身体创伤。本研究旨在利用Tor网络相关Web服务的精细移动流量数据，分析法国20个大都市地区儿童色情消费的地方模式。通过将Tor移动下载流量与地方层面的临时色情消费模式进行关联，我们保守估计，法国观测到的Tor移动下载流量中约3.3%与儿童性虐待材料的消费有关。相比之下，我们估算的Tor上儿童色情内容的全球占比为16.9%。与关于性虐待儿童及其图像内容消费之间联系的现有文献一致，我们观察到，在控制包括社会人口特征、投票行为、邻近兴趣点和谷歌趋势查询在内的一系列空间与非空间特征后，我们的儿童色情消费估计值与1341个法国市镇报告的性暴力受害者人数之间存在正向且统计上显著的关系，反之亦然，这验证了我们的发现。尽管这是从空间流行病学角度审视儿童色情的初步探索性尝试，但我们相信，这项研究为公共卫生官员提供了宝贵信息，有助于优先确定公共宣传活动的目标区域，并有望为该领域的未来研究路径提供参考。